Why Meeting Culture Got Worse After COVID

The friction that used to protect your calendar

Before 2020, scheduling a meeting had natural friction. You needed a conference room. Rooms were scarce. Booking one required checking availability, reserving it in a system, and hoping nobody bumped you. If you wanted people from another floor or another building, you needed to coordinate logistics. Meetings had a physical cost.

That friction was not pleasant, but it served a purpose. It made people think twice before scheduling a meeting. Is this important enough to go through the trouble of booking a room, gathering everyone in one place, and blocking an hour on the calendar? Sometimes the answer was no, and the meeting became an email instead.

Remote work removed every bit of that friction overnight.

When meetings became free, they became infinite

In a remote-first world, scheduling a meeting costs nothing. No room to book, no commute to plan, no physical logistics. You click "New Meeting," pick a time, add attendees, and hit send. Done in 15 seconds. The marginal cost of one more meeting dropped to effectively zero.

The result was predictable. Meeting volume exploded. Studies from multiple workplace analytics firms have found that the average knowledge worker's time spent in meetings roughly tripled between 2019 and 2023. And it has not come back down. The pandemic may be over, but the meeting habits it created are thoroughly entrenched.

The average professional now spends somewhere between 10 and 15 hours per week in meetings. For managers, it is often closer to 20. For contractors and consultants who sit in on meetings across multiple clients, the number can be even higher, because each client schedules independently of the others.

The visibility problem compounds it

Here is what makes the meeting explosion especially painful for multi-client professionals. Each client sees only their own calendar. They have no idea how many meetings you are already in with other organizations. So they schedule freely, based on the availability they can see, which is only the availability within their own tenant.

From Client A's perspective, your Tuesday looks wide open. From Client B's perspective, same thing. In reality, Client A filled your morning and Client B filled your afternoon, and neither knows the other exists. By the time you open both calendars and realize what happened, you have 8 hours of back-to-back meetings with zero breaks.

This is not a problem that any individual client can solve. They are behaving rationally given the information they have. The problem is that nobody has the full picture. Except you, if you have the right tool.

Why "just say no" does not work

The standard advice for meeting overload is to decline more meetings. This works when you are a full-time employee with political capital. It does not work as well when you are a contractor whose continued engagement depends on being responsive and available.

Declining a meeting with a client is not the same as declining one with a colleague. It carries different weight. Clients are paying for your time, and when you decline a meeting without offering an alternative, it can feel like rejection. The relationship dynamics are different.

The better approach is not to decline meetings reactively but to manage availability proactively. Share your free time before people try to book it. Offer alternatives when a slot does not work. Make it easy for clients to find times that genuinely work across your full schedule, not just the schedule they can see.

What organizations can do

Some forward-thinking companies are starting to push back on meeting culture at the organizational level. Meeting-free days (often Wednesdays or Fridays) give people guaranteed blocks of uninterrupted time. Default meeting durations of 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60 build in transition time. Required agendas before meetings can be scheduled force organizers to justify the meeting's existence.

These are good policies, but they only work within a single organization. They do not help the consultant who works across three companies, each with its own meeting culture. The consultant needs a tool-level solution: something that aggregates all their calendars, flags the conflicts, and makes it easy to communicate real availability.

Individual tactics that actually help

Buffer blocks. After every cross-client meeting, block 15 minutes on all your other calendars. This prevents the zero-gap schedule that leads to chronic lateness and mental exhaustion.

Proactive availability sharing. Instead of waiting for meeting requests and reacting to them, send your available time slots at the beginning of each week. This shifts the dynamic from defensive to proactive.

Morning calendar review. Spend 2 minutes each morning looking at your unified schedule. Catch the conflicts that got booked overnight. Move the meetings that need moving while there is still time to do it gracefully.

Unified view. None of the above works if you cannot see all your calendars at once. You need a single view where every meeting from every client is visible, color-coded, and checked for conflicts. That is the foundation everything else builds on.

Meeting culture is not going back to 2019. The friction is gone and it is not coming back. But you can still protect your time. Start with manyCalendars, because step one of fixing your schedule is actually being able to see it.